Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. Follow on Twitter @johnrplatt.

Twice a week, John Platt shines a light on endangered species from all over the globe, exploring not just why they are dying out but also what's being done to rescue them from oblivion. Follow on Twitter @johnrplatt.

The cancer, known as devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), has wiped out nearly 70 percent of the world’s Tasmanian devils in the past 10 years. Once DFTD infects a devil, the cancer destroys the animal’s mouth, filling it with tumors that make it impossible for the animal to eat. Starvation and death follow within three to six months. Transmission is easy, because devils frequently bite one another on the mouth during mating or while fighting for territory.

Until now, scientists have had few, if any, clues to the origins of DFTD. But the new research indicates that the cancer may have actually attached itself to the Tasmanian devils, perhaps via their prey, as a kind of parasite.

The researchers behind this discovery sampled 25 different DFTD tumors from all over the Australian island of Tasmania (the only place that devils live in the wild). After sequencing the tumors’ genes, the team found that the growths were all genetically distinct from the devils themselves, but otherwise essentially identical to one another. In other words, the malignancies do not have the same DNA as the animals they are killing.

Meanwhile, the sequencing found that DFTD originates in Schwann cells, which are vital to the peripheral nervous system, and that a particular protein, periaxin, which is expressed by these cells, was also present in every tumor. According to lead researcher Elizabeth Murchison of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y., the presence of periaxin could be used to diagnose DFTD before symptoms begin to display, an important step in quarantining disease-free devils to maintain a healthy population. It could also, possibly, be exploited to try to find a cure for the disease.

Other mutations of periaxin have been linked to forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Guillain-Barré syndrome is also caused by Schwann cell malfunctions.

what is there to discuss? a minor slight commenting against a geo-political phenomena, or the imature over reactions of ignoramie? because the only option left after those are the topic and no one comes here for that.

First thing I wondered about when I heard about the tumors was whether they were a similar phonomenon to the tumors observed in dogs that turned out to be cancer cells spread from one dog to another by sloughing off during intimate physical contact. So I wasn’t surprized to see that the same researcher figured out both diseases.

I also recollect that HeLa cells (cancer cells from a patient named Henrietta Lachs, that were cultured for research in many labs) had contaminated many other cell cultures in research labs during the 1960s, Perhaps other human cancers are spread the same way, it is not the patient’s own cells that have turned cancerous, but cancer cells pick up from some other source?